Canadian Wine and the European Trade Deal

How will the new European trade deal affect the Canadian wine industry? Here are some excerpts quoted from a recent story by Dianne Buckner, host of CBC’s Dragon Den. The story ran on CBC, Reuters and Canadian Business magazine.

Unlike Canada’s cheese-makers and fisheries who find themselves disadvantaged by the new deal, some in Canada’s wine industry are thrilled by the prospect of new customers. Just ask the president of the Canadian Vintners Association. “The agreement opens preferential market access to the EU’s more than 500 million consumers,” says Dan Paszkowski. “It creates new opportunities for Canadian wine exports to Europe.”

Canadian consumers won’t see any fabulous new bargains on imported wine. The savings under the new deal will be insignificant — a few pennies per bottle. That’s certainly not going to be enough to turn a wine aficionado’s head, or lure them away from buying a domestic wine.

Meanwhile on the other side of the deal, savings for Europeans who buy Canadian wine are bigger, but still not huge: a 45 cent price reduction on sparkling wine, 18 cents for still wine. Natalie MacLean sees huge potential for Canadian wine in Europe.

MacLean believes the beauty of wine is its diversity. “What we offer is different from what Europeans have now,” she says. “We specialize in cool climate wines and not just ice wine. Our riesling, pinot noir, sparkling wines, our shiraz and cabernet franc — those are really big specialties for us both in Niagara and the Okanagan. The Europeans will be open to our wines.”

MacLean looks back to the NAFTA agreement and what it did to spur Canadian vintners to up their game. “We ripped up a lot of bad vines,” she says. “There was a higher drive to quality, and although our volume market share went down, we got a smaller piece of a much bigger pie. So our overall production went up, our quality went up, and the number of wineries skyrocketed, especially in BC and Niagara.”

She says CETA will benefit Canadian consumers also, since an open export market for fine Canadian wines will again be a driver for quality here at home.

Wine journalist Natalie MacLean’s 10 top picks of Canadian wines ready to take on the world:

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BIOGRAPHY

Natalie MacLean

Canada's Most Quoted Wine Writer

Natalie MacLean is editor of Canada's largest wine review web site, publishing hundreds of wine reviews every week for more than 160,000 members. She was named the World's Best Drinks Writer the World Food Media Awards in Australia.

Natalie has published two books with Random House, the second was named one of Amazon's Best Books of the Year. Get access to all of her reviews today by becoming a member of her site.